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Apple Sues Employee Accused of Leaking Secrets to The Wall Street Journal
Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:
Apple this month sued its former employee Andrew Aude in California state court, alleging that he breached the company’s confidentiality agreement and violated labor laws by leaking sensitive information to the media and employees at other tech companies. Apple has demanded a jury trial, and it is seeking damages in excess of $25,000…
In April 2023, for example, Apple alleges that Aude leaked a list of finalized features for the iPhone’s Journal app to a journalist at The Wall Street Journal on a phone call. That same month, The Wall Street Journal’s Aaron Tilley published a report titled “Apple Plans iPhone Journaling App in Expansion of Health Initiatives.”
Using the encrypted messaging app Signal, Aude is said to have sent “over 1,400” messages to the same journalist, who Aude referred to as “Homeboy.” He is also accused of sending “over 10,000 text messages” to another journalist at the website The Information, and he allegedly traveled “across the continent” to meet with her.
The fact that this former Apple employee had the journalist saved as “Homeboy” in his contacts is cringeworthy. And the fact that Aude travelled across the continent to meet with this Information reporter makes me think there was (is?) something personal between the two. Seriously, 10,000 text messages seems peculiar — perhaps that’s worth looking into in regards to journalistic integrity.
Apple believes that Aude’s actions were “extensive and purposeful,” with Aude allegedly admitting that he leaked information so he could “kill” products and features with which he took issue. The company alleges that his wrongful disclosures resulted in at least five news articles discussing the company’s confidential and proprietary information. Apple says these public revelations impeded its ability to “surprise and delight” with its latest products.
This is ridiculous. Apple alleges Aude leaked the information to The Wall Street Journal and The Information so that he could “kill products and features with which he took issue.” It’s almost unbelievable — first that Aude is so stupid that he thought the public catching wind of unreleased features would end up killing them somehow, and second that he thinks leaking information is a more appropriate way to address his concerns than speaking to his superiors within the company. I’m very curious as to how Aude landed a job at Apple with this level of idiocy.
In a November 2023 interview, Apple alleges that Aude denied leaking confidential information to anyone. However, during that interview, Apple alleges that Aude went to the bathroom and deleted “significant amounts of evidence” from his work iPhone, including the Signal app that he used to communicate with “Homeboy.”
This is easily one of the most hilarious labor disputes of all time. Once Aude was caught red-handed, he didn’t — I don’t know — admit to the act, deny wrongdoing, or find some other way to rescue himself. He, like a 7-year-old child caught with their hands in the cookie jar, went to the bathroom and deleted the chats from Signal that he had on his work phone in a hurry. I truly have not encountered an Apple employee who was this stupid before; why would any moderately intelligent person leak information to the press on a corporate-monitored work phone? And if someone were to do that, why would they save the chats or applications they used to leak information?
This whole situation is beyond parody. What a total moron — and good on Apple for catching on and suing.
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Thoughts on Humane’s New Ai Pin ‘Video Handbook’
Quinn Nelson, producer of the technology YouTube channel Snazzy Labs, posted on the social media website X a link to Humane’s new owner’s guide video, which, according to Bethany Bongiorno, Humane’s chief executive, was meant for Ai Pin buyers “to help them understand how to use” their Ai Pins before they arrive next month. Bongiorno said she would speak with her team about putting it up on YouTube, which I think is a good idea since I feel it’s the most interesting demonstration of the device yet. It’s produced well, the presenters are knowledgeable, it doesn’t have any discernibly sloppy mistakes, and it’s the most lengthy, detailed walkthrough of the Ai Pin’s features yet. I watched the 30-minute video after my slamming of the device in November to try to learn more about the Ai Pin more, and I recommend everyone do too — it’s what Humane’s initial announcement should’ve been.
But that’s just criticism of the video. The product, the Ai Pin — an artificial-intelligence-powered lapel pin with a projector, camera, microphone, and speaker — is still lackluster at best. The video was broken up into a few sections: hardware and accessories, voice interactions, the camera and images, the Laser Ink Display — essentially a projector that displays an image onto a user’s hand — music, memory, telephone calls and text messages, and “Humane.Center,” the website used to control the Ai Pin.
Hardware: The battery booster appears to be compulsory in most cases and enables what Humane calls the “Perpetual Power System,” which, candidly speaking, is buzzword-filled nonsense. It’s a battery — everyone knows what a battery is — system with the ability to hot-swap boosters that clip to the underside of a shirt, holding the device in place. When the Ai Pin was fastened to a long-sleeve shirt, it didn’t pull it down, which was relieving, but Humane also sells an optional, lighter clear plastic attachment to replace the booster in case a user happens to be wearing something extra lightweight, such as workout clothing. Humane didn’t show the device clipped to a T-shirt, though, which is the most common article of clothing it’ll be attached to, and the presenters mostly wore long-sleeve jackets — for which there is a clip that can be fastened to thicker coats — and sweaters, which is concerning. (Maybe this is just because it’s spring.)
Voice interactions: As demonstrated in previous Humane videos, the primary method of interaction is the voice assistant, which is accessed via the touchpad and a series of gestures. There are simply way too many gestures — they’re all variations of tapping or holding down one or two fingers to activate certain features like the camera or laser projector. And again, I do not understand the point of having such an assistant attached to a shirt — the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pro does the same thing. The assistant was also slow at times, requiring presenters to continue to speak to the camera as they waited for the assistant to give a response to distract from the deafening silence of a computer sending queries to a server. It also seems to take a while for internet-related queries, such as searching for the weather. A smartphone seems like a more cost-effective and less-distracting option for most — especially when in public.
Camera: The Ai Pin acts like a more personal version of Google Lens, and I think it’s fascinating. This is the most compelling use case for the product yet since carrying a smartphone around for quick spur-of-the-moment shots is often cumbersome. Sometimes, something needs to be captured instantly, without distraction, and the camera on the Ai Pin executes this perfectly. (The quality of the produced images isn’t spectacular, but it’s a small device.) I also liked the feature where you can point the device at anything, such as a book or building, and have the voice assistant provide information about it, but I’d much rather be able to view and read this information rather than have a voice narrate it to me via a loudspeaker that everyone around me can hear.
The Laser Ink display: The only way of visually viewing and interacting with information from the Ai Pin is the Laser Ink display, as Humane calls it, a projector that activates when the device is asked a question and detects a palm out in front of it. The laser projector, while bright, seems less than ideal for dense, small text, since it isn’t very crisp — especially in broad daylight. Also, palm space is limited, so the device can only project small messages and large interface controls. Navigating the interface requires quite a bit of skill, too. There is a singular solution to all of this: a smartphone. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide carry 6-inch bright, crisp, colorful organic-LED displays with powerful processors and high pixel densities in their pockets daily, and the Ai Pin seems like a compromised, unnecessary version of a technology that already exists. The Ai Pin’s laser display is worthless.
Music: Anyone who chooses to listen to music on this lapel pin is a psychotic human being.
Memory: The usefulness of this “memory” feature — which exists due to the nature of AI large language models, such as the one from OpenAI that powers the Ai Pin — is minimal because it does not interact with iOS or Android at all. Most people communicate with others and store quick notes on their smartphones, and thus, their corpus of human connections and personal anecdotes is stored in one locked-down place. Humane has no plan to access that corpus — instead, it’s relying on people to use the Ai Pin exclusively to send text messages, make phone calls, and store quick notes. (Apparently, its own employees can’t even use the Ai Pin’s notes feature exclusively.) The “memory” features of the voice assistant — which come into play when a user asks questions like, “Catch me up on message conversations,” or, “Where did I park?” — will only be useful if someone decides to store their life’s information on their Ai Pin rather than their phone, a behavior I don’t think anyone, not even Humane’s diehard users, will partake in.
Telephone calls and messages: Continuing on the previous theme, the Ai Pin does not connect to a user’s smartphone whatsoever — Humane instead encourages users to make telephone calls, join group messages, and do all of their communication via the Ai Pin, which isn’t even possible, since it doesn’t support most messaging services like Slack or WhatsApp at launch. It’s a ludicrous strategy that will never take off — period. The fact that Humane thinks anyone will choose to have their phone calls on a loudspeaker in public or use an AI voice assistant to write text messages is so astonishing to me. On a related note, did you know some companies sell telephones that you can take anywhere and that also happen to connect to all the instant messaging services in the world? You can get one for less than the price of an Ai Pin — groundbreaking.
Humane.Center: There is not even a smartphone app to manage the Ai Pin, which seems like it would be the most basic of requirements for any internet-connected product made in 2024. Humane doesn’t think so, instead developing a web portal for access to user data. This website is the only way to access images taken with the device, add contacts, view full text message threads and call logs, and change settings, like connecting to a Wi-Fi network or adding “integrations,” Humane’s term for third-party software. The on-device projection interface is so lackluster and limited that I don’t think anyone would seriously want to use it — and waving a palm around in the air seems like it would feel like a royal pain after more than a minute — so the only way to interact with the information the Ai Pin provides is a website. It’s just insulting.
So yes, I’m still not bullish on the Ai Pin. It’s a bad smartphone that does less than a smartphone while being slower than one and being more annoying than any other modern consumer product. And it’s $800 with a $25-a-month subscription for a second phone number and no phone integration. Great video, terrible product. Go back to the drawing board, Humane — but please do publish this video on YouTube.
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The X Baltimore Bridge Conspiracies Are Unhinged
David Gilbert, writing for Wired:
Conspiracists and far–right extremists are blaming just about everything and everyone for the Baltimore bridge collapse on Tuesday morning.
A non-exhaustive list of things that are getting blamed for the bridge collapse on Telegram and X include: President Joe Biden, Hamas, ISIS, P Diddy, Nickelodeon, India, former President Barack Obama, Islam, aliens, Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Wokeness, Ukraine, foreign aid, the CIA, Jewish people, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, Covid vaccines, DEI, immigrants, Black people and lockdowns.
The Francis Scott Key truss bridge actually collapsed when the MV Dali cargo ship collided with one of the bridge supports. Six construction workers, who were filling potholes on the bridge at the time, are presumed dead. The ship is owned by Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd, and the 22-person crew were all Indian. The ship was on route to Colombo, Sri Lanka at the time of the accident.
X, the social media website owned by no one else other than Elon Musk, the billionaire who has made an effort to push the dangerous great replacement conspiracy theory on his website, has been inundated with nonsense comments from blue-check-bearing accounts with prioritized replies. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, had her account reinstated however many months ago on X after the previous Twitter ownership permanently suspended it over her barbaric coronavirus conspiracy theories — now, she insinuated the collapse of the bridge could be due to a terrorist attack. (It was not a terrorist attack.)
Leftist, progressive users have blamed the attack on U.S. support of the wars in Israel and Ukraine while also complaining about how overfunded the Defense Department is. The bridge collapsed due to a Singaporean cargo ship colliding into a pillar of the bridge — how that is the Defense Department’s fault is beyond me. Meanwhile, right-wing nuts continued to blame the president and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for spreading non-existent “misinformation.” Very few of these posts — exclusively on X and former President Donald Trump’s social media website, Truth Social — had Community Notes pinned to them, presumably because most intelligent users authorized to write notes have better things to do than debunk bizarre antisemitic conspiracies on a dying social media platform.
However, less-intelligent conspiracy theorists continue to brainwash teenagers, the elderly, and anyone who gets their news exclusively on X — all to push their political propaganda. The owner of the website, Musk, embraces it in the name of “free speech” and the “First Amendment” without actually having the intellectual capacity to understand that the Constitution only applies to the government, not private platforms. Of course, none of Musk’s sycophantic followers will understand this quirk of the legal system, though, so we’re instead stuck with the most popular real-time news website peddling racist conspiracies until enough people move to Threads, Meta’s clone of X.
If this is how it is when a bridge collapses and kills six people, imagine how it’s going to be on Election Day when half the population’s preferred candidate loses — whomever that may be.
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The Wall Street Journal Profiles Phil Schiller
Aaron Tilley and Kim Mackrael, in a profile of Phil Schiller, Apple’s former senior vice president of product marketing and now fellow, for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple came around to taking a 30% commission on paid apps or services purchased in the App Store. Initially, Jobs said in 2008 that the company didn’t “intend to make money off the App Store,” according to documents that came out in the Epic case.
After Jobs’s passing in 2011, Schiller kept Jobs’s philosophy alive across everything he did. The two were close, and Schiller often mirrored Jobs’s fierce competitiveness and tendency to praise Apple and disparage competitors. Inside Apple, he came to be referred to as Jobs’s “mini-me” due to the manner in which he often mirrored the company co-founder’s perspective.
“Of the people still at Apple, he is one of the few that still carry the torch of Steve Jobs’s vision,” said Tim Bajarin, a longtime Apple analyst who has known Schiller since his return to the company.
One thing Jobs insisted on in the App Review process is that the company should always have someone reviewing each app that made it into the store. Schiller continued that tradition, eschewing excessive use of artificial intelligence in favor of reviews and careful curation.
If I have this right, Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder who insisted on Apple’s tight control over the iOS App Store, only craved control over the apps that were on the App Store. As Tilley and Mackrael quote Jobs saying in 2008, Jobs never wanted to make money from the App Store’s 15–30 percent commission — he just wanted the control that came with that commission. Now that Apple is in hot water over the commission, which in my opinion is what started all of this regulatory scrutiny both in the European Union and the United States, I suggest it lower the percentage it takes to 15 percent for companies that make over $1 million a year on the App Store, and 7 percent for everyone else.
Apple doesn’t need to give up control over the App Store — it just needs to make it seem like the App Store is competitive (which it already is). The 30 percent commission has done irreparable damage to Apple’s public relations over the last several years. Anyone, even people who like Apple and think it deserves a cut of purchases, can agree that the App Store’s rules are a mess. In addition to lowering the fee, I think Apple should also further relax its anti-steering provisions specifically in the vein of payment processing. Apple has (had) to play some bargaining here if it doesn’t (didn’t) want to be caught by the ire of regulators, including the U.S. Justice Department. If it doesn’t give up the anti-steering provisions, it risks losing control over content moderation in the App Store specifically in the United States — the European Union has already busted Apple’s shackles.
Regulators are not even nearly as smart as Apple — everyone knows that. But Apple missed its chance to self-regulate, to give a little and take a little, even when relaxing anti-steering provisions would’ve still fallen within the bounds of Jobs’ App Store ethos set out in 2008.
PS: I still love Schiller.
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‘Cowardly Snowflake’
Sarah Jong, writing for The Verge about United States v. Apple:
From cloud streaming games to CarPlay, the DOJ complaint tries to rope in the burning grievances of every kind of nerd and then some. The only thing that’s missing is a tirade on how ever-increasing screen sizes are victimizing me, a person with small hands. (At the Thursday press conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)
You can almost forget this is a lawsuit and not just the compiled observations of a single very motivated poster in The Verge comments section — until you get to page 57. There, the document suddenly changes voice, finally pivoting into a formal communication to a judge. “Mobile phones,” the complaint reads primly, “are portable devices that enable communications over radio frequencies instead of telephone landlines.”
The lawyers who wrote the Justice Department’s complaints against Apple would make for great technology bloggers — even better than me, dare I say. Together, they should create a new blog: Cowardly Snowflake. It’s like Daring Fireball, but written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I’d instantly subscribe.
The first part of the Justice Department’s complaint truly reads like a non-fiction “airing of grievances.” It reminds me of the Declaration of Independence, but instead of making good points against the British monarchy, it serves as a poorly researched fantasy of the technology landscape. Now that’s blog-worthy. Seriously, if you have three hours to kill, I’d recommend reading the entire thing just for fun.
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Thursday’s United States v. Apple Lawsuit is the ‘Beeper Lawsuit’
Yours truly, writing in January about Beeper, a cross-platform messaging app that aimed and failed to add iMessage to its arsenal of services:
Shortly after Apple revoked Beeper’s unauthorized access to the iMessage service, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted the following to the social media website X, quoting The Verge’s article reporting on the changes Apple made: “Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage? Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors. Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure.”
A week later, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah; and Representatives Jerry Nadler of New York and Ken Buck of Colorado wrote a bipartisan letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter calling for the Justice Department to “investigate whether this potentially anticompetitive conduct by Apple violated antitrust laws.” “This” conduct refers to Apple’s immediate shutdown of Beeper Mini. The members of Congress collectively write: “We write regarding Apple’s potential anticompetitive treatment of the Beeper Mini messaging application. We have long-championed increased competition, innovation, and consumer choice in the digital marketplace. To protect free and open markets, it is critical for the Antitrust Division to be vigilant in enforcing our antitrust laws… We are therefore concerned that Apple’s recent actions to disable Beeper Mini harm competition, eliminate choices for consumers, and will discourage future innovation and investment in interoperable messaging services.”
In other words, the letter tells the Justice Department to investigate Apple for locking its doors to thieves. There are two main points to untangle here: that the members of Congress show apparent illiteracy in both antitrust law and technology, and that opening up messaging ecosystems is not a job of the government. It is quite obvious that these members of Congress have no clue what Beeper did to gain access to the iMessage service — nor have any interest in finding out — and that Beeper’s Migicovsky brainwashed the members into taking congressional action against Apple as retaliation for destroying Beeper’s flawed-from-the-start business model. Speaking of Migicovsky, he promoted the letter with his own commentary on X shortly after it was published. It does not require any knowledge of government lobbying to conclude that Migicovsky — and perhaps some of his cohorts — lobbied the members of Congress to get the letter published for publicity.
Thursday’s lawsuit is a direct consequence of Klobuchar, Lee, Nandler, and Buck’s letter hitting Kanter’s desk. Kanter, who leads the antitrust division of the Justice Department, filed the lawsuit yesterday — his name is listed on the suit. Due to Beeper’s aggressive government lobbying on Capitol Hill, the members of Congress wrote the letter to Kanter, who then was brainwashed by Beeper’s marketing speak and told his technology-illiterate aides to write a poorly researched, ill-informed complaint against the world’s largest technology firm.
Furthermore, the complaint includes this passage, as I wrote in my annotation Thursday:
Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users. By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users’ less secure than they could otherwise be.
Not only is this passage entirely false, but it also reeks of Beeper and Eric Migicovsky, Beeper’s chief executive, directly influencing the lawsuit. Migicovsky himself found this uncanny, and on the social media website X, posted: “This DOJ v Apple lawsuit is basically Eric Migicovsky v Apple. I swear I did not do this on purpose,” referring to the Justice Department. Migicovsky wrote this in response to a passage from the lawsuit which essentially served as a call-out to Pebble, the now-defunct smartwatch company Migicovsky founded that brought him into the spotlight, in the “Smartwatches” section. Migicovsky also backs the Justice Department’s incorrect complaints about Beeper Mini up on X, saying he “couldn’t have said it better” himself.
Beeper did not “fix” broken cross-platform messaging — that is what Beeper wants you to believe, but it isn’t what happened. Beeper infiltrated Apple’s private iMessage service meant to serve as a selling point for Apple devices and sold access to it with a subscription. Beeper is not a “third-party developer,” Beeper is a thief. A third-party developer (keyword: “developer”) would refer to someone who gains authorized access to Apple services to create products on Apple’s platforms. Beeper is not a developer — it is a company with the sole intention of profiting from another corporation’s infrastructure. The Justice Department is supposed to serve as the just and correct arbiter of conflicts. Instead, it has chosen to pick favorites in one of the most important lawsuits it has filed in its entire existence because some scrappy start-up founded by a failed smartwatch manufacturer lobbied Congress.
Without even describing the full facts to the court in the lawsuit, the Justice Department aims to sell a one-sided story to the jury that is simply factually incorrect. I hope and assume Apple will fight this moot, incorrect point in court to the fullest extent possible. Lying government lobbyists’ words don’t belong in a court of law — they belong in a concessions stand outside the Capitol in Washington selling T-shirts. If TikTok did this, it’d be banned in the United States a week from now.
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Annotating United States v. Apple (2024)
The Justice Department, writing in its lawsuit against Apple filed on Thursday:
For example, by denying iPhone users the ability to choose their trusted banking apps as their digital wallet, Apple retains full control both over the consumer and also over the stream of income generated by forcing users to use only Apple-authorized products in the digital wallet. Apple also prohibits the creation and use of alternative app stores curated to reflect a consumer’s preferences with respect to security, privacy, or other values. These and many other features would be beneficial to consumers and empower them to make choices about what smartphone to buy and what apps and products to patronize. But allowing consumers to make that choice is an obstacle to Apple’s ability to maintain its monopoly.
Has the Justice Department forgotten that Apple is a private corporation?
Apple inflates the price for buying and using iPhones while preventing the development of features like alternative app stores, innovative super apps, cloud-streaming games, and secure texting.
Samsung’s flagship handset is more expensive than Apple’s, but go on about “inflating the price for buying and using iPhones.”
Apple’s U.S. market share by revenue is over 70 percent in the performance smartphone market—a more expensive segment of the broader smartphone market where Apple’s own executives recognize the company competes—and over 65 percent for all smartphones. These market shares have remained remarkably durable over the last decade.
“By revenue?” What nonsense! Is this how the Justice Department concluded Apple is a monopoly?
Following that consent decree in October 2003, Apple launched a cross-platform version of iTunes that was compatible with the Windows operating system. As a result, a much larger group of users could finally use the iPod and iTunes, including the iTunes Store. The iTunes Store allowed users to buy and download music and play it on their iTunes computer application or on the iPod. Apple benefited substantially from this new customer base. In the first two years after launching the iPod, Apple sold a few hundred thousand devices. The year after launching a Windows-compatible version of iTunes and gaining access to millions more customers, Apple sold millions of devices. Apple went on to sell hundreds of millions of iPod devices over the next two decades.
The Justice Department attributes the iPod’s success to its consent decree against Microsoft.
Third, Apple uses these restrictions to extract monopoly rents from third parties in a variety of ways, including app fees and revenue-share requirements. For most of the last 15 years, Apple collected a tax in the form of a 30 percent commission on the price of any app downloaded from the App Store, a 30 percent tax on in-app purchases, and fees to access the tools needed to develop iPhone native apps in the first place. While Apple has reduced the tax it collects from a subset of developers, Apple still extracts 30 percent from many app makers.
“Monopoly rents” is an interesting way of describing a fee for services the App Store provides. Warranted or not, we live in the United States — a capitalist country — and the market decides what’s sane or not. Not the government.
Apple recognizes that super apps with mini programs would threaten its monopoly. As one Apple manager put it, allowing super apps to become “the main gateway where people play games, book a car, make payments, etc.” would “let the barbarians in at the gate.” Why? Because when a super app offers popular mini programs, “iOS stickiness goes down.”
Apple does not need to host content it doesn’t want to host for whatever reason. If you don’t like that, build your own phone. I like iOS, so I’ll live with the rules. It seems like my fellow iOS users agree with me.
That is not a monopoly — that’s just business.
Apple did not respond to the risk that super apps might disrupt its monopoly by innovating. Instead, Apple exerted its control over app distribution to stifle others’ innovation. Apple created, strategically broadened, and aggressively enforced its App Store Guidelines to effectively block apps from hosting mini programs. Apple’s conduct disincentivized investments in mini program development and caused U.S. companies to abandon or limit support for the technology in the United States.
The section this excerpt is from can be called the “WeChat Section,” and yet WeChat, the prime example of Apple “abusing its monopoly power,” remains on the App Store today. This is nonsense.
Until recently, Apple would have required users to download cloud streaming software separately for each individual game, install identical app updates for each game individually, and make repeated trips to Apple’s App Store to find and download games. Apple’s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.
Keywords: “Until recently.” “You aren’t speeding now, but we’ll still write you a ticket for speeding because we think you sped before.”
Apple undermines cloud gaming apps in other ways too, such as by requiring cloud games to use Apple’s proprietary payment system and necessitating game overhauls and payment redesigns specifically for the iPhone.
“…requiring cloud games to use Apple’s proprietary payment system” is wrong as of a few weeks ago.
While all mobile phones can send and receive SMS messages, OTT only works between users who sign up for and communicate through the same messaging app. As a result, a user cannot send an OTT message to a friend unless the friend also uses the same messaging app.
How is that last part Apple’s fault?
And when users receive video calls, third-party messaging apps cannot access the iPhone camera to allow users to preview their appearance on video before answering a call.
There is an application programming interface built within iOS for developers to be able to add that functionality to their apps.
“Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for “breaking” chats where other participants own iPhones. This effect is particularly powerful for certain demographics, like teenagers—where the iPhone’s share is 85 percent, according to one survey. This social pressure reinforces switching costs and drives users to continue buying iPhones—solidifying Apple’s smartphone dominance not because Apple has made its smartphone better, but because it has made communicating with other smartphones worse.
That is not Apple’s fault. Try suing Lamborghini because someone got made fun of for not having a Lamborghini.
Recently, Apple blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users. By rejecting solutions that would allow for cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users’ less secure than they could otherwise be.
That’s the Beeper reference.
In 2013, when Apple started offering users the ability to connect their iPhones with third-party smartwatches, Apple provided third-party smartwatch developers with access to various APIs related to the Apple Notification Center Service, Calendar, Contacts, and Geolocation. The following year, Apple introduced the Apple Watch and began limiting third-party access to new and improved APIs for smartwatch functionality.
Apple is a private corporation. Nobody is entitled to access to iOS. As I pointed out earlier on Thursday, the smartwatch argument is the only somewhat sound argument, legally speaking, but it’s still woozy.
Apple instead requires these users to disable Apple’s iMessage service on the iPhone in order to use the same phone number for both devices. This is a non-starter for most iPhone users.
Great work, Justice Department, you just contradicted your entire “Messaging” section with one sentence.
Thus, switching to a different smartphone requires leaving behind the familiarity of an everyday app, setting up a new digital wallet, and potentially losing access to certain credentials and personal data stored in Apple Wallet.
Moving to a new house requires learning where the bathroom is again.
The exclusionary and anticompetitive acts described above are part of Apple’s ongoing course of conduct to build and maintain its smartphone monopoly. They are hardly exhaustive. Rather, they exemplify the innovation Apple has stifled and Apple’s overall strategy of using its power over app distribution and app creation to selectively block threatening innovations.
“Hardly exhaustive,” probably because the Justice Department hasn’t pointed out a single “act” where Apple abuses its non-existent monopoly power.
These subscriptions [sic] services can also increase switching costs among iPhone users. If an Apple user can only access their subscription service on an iPhone, they may experience significant costs, time, lost content, and other frictions if they attempt to switch to a non-Apple smartphone or subscription service.
It’s a crime to do business in the United States in 2024, according to the federal government.
Apple has told automakers that the next generation of Apple CarPlay will take over all of the screens, sensors, and gauges in a car, forcing users to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience if they want to use any of the features provided by CarPlay.
Nobody is forcing drivers to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience. This is purely uneducated. CarPlay does not supplant an automaker’s interface, it just supplements it for iOS users who would like access to the Apple-made interface. A user is always able to disable CarPlay or opt out of using it if they don’t want to use it or don’t have an iPhone. Why did the Justice Department choose the most technology-illiterate people to file a lawsuit against the world’s largest technology corporation?
Apple’s conduct extends beyond just monopoly profits and even affects the flow of speech. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its role as a TV and movie producer and has exercised that role to control content.
Sometimes you read something so incomprehensibly stupid that it just leaves you speechless.
“If Apple wanted to, Apple could allow iPhone users to send encrypted messages to Android users while still using iMessage on their iPhone, which would instantly improve the privacy and security of iPhone and other smartphone users.
Apple already does that. You can download WhatsApp for free on iOS today.
Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone and performance smartphone markets because it has the power to control prices or exclude competition in each of them.
The way the Justice Department calculated that is wrong — it calculated it by revenue, as stated earlier. Apparently, it’s illegal to be good at business and make a profit in the United States.
For example, if an iPhone user wants to buy an Android smartphone, they are likely to face significant financial, technological, and behavioral obstacles to switching. The user may need to re-learn how to operate their smartphone using a new interface, transfer large amounts of data (e.g., contacts), purchase new apps, or transfer or buy new subscriptions and accessories.
Exhibit B: When moving to a new house, you need to learn where the bathroom is again.
Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers. Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017)…
Due to Apple’s monopolistic practices, the Windows Phone and the Fire Phone both failed, according to the Justice Department. I am not making this up.
What a stupid lawsuit. I annotated this lawsuit as I was reading it on Threads and Twitter, too, if you’d like highlighted images of the excerpts.
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More on United States v. Apple’s ‘Walled Garden’ Problem
Victoria Song, writing for The Verge:
The DOJ also notes that Apple limits third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger in comparison to iMessage. For example, you have to dive into permissions to let these apps operate in the background or access the iPhone’s camera for video calls. They also can’t incorporate SMS, meaning you have to convince friends to download the same apps if you want to use them. iMessage, however, does all this natively.
And while Apple recently agreed to support RCS to make cross-platform messaging better, the DOJ isn’t buying it. It notes that Apple not only hasn’t adopted it yet but that third-party apps would still be “prohibited from incorporating RCS just as they are prohibited from incorporating SMS.” The DOJ also takes issue with the fact that Apple only agreed to adopt a 2019 version of RCS. Unless Apple agrees to support future versions, it argues “RCS could soon be broken on iPhones anyway.”
Did the Justice Department find the most technology-illiterate, incompetent, stupid lawyers in the United States to file this lawsuit against the world’s largest corporation? “For example, you have to dive into permissions” to “access the iPhone’s camera for video calls.” I trust Song’s reporting — I know she isn’t editorializing here and this is purely how the Justice Department’s lawsuit is written. This is such a ridiculous argument — so ridiculous that I truly don’t even know where to begin to refute it.
Requiring permissions, in the words of the Justice Department, is “abusing monopoly power?” It is one dialog box that a user is faced with once to protect their privacy. It does not result in a single penny for Apple, no matter what the user selects. If the Justice Department aims to remove permission prompts — prompts that I have not heard a single American ever complain about — it is an absolute disgrace to this country.
And the Justice Department, for some reason, “isn’t buying” Apple’s adoption of Rich Communication Services because it has opted to adopt a 2019 version. That is just incorrect — the last published version of the standard by the body that controls it was published in 2019. The “latest” version, according to the Justice Department, is the one Google published. And Google participates in the duopoly. What is the Justice Department’s goal here, to push Apple to adopt Google’s standards just to sue Google for the same thing? It’s technology illiteracy at its finest.
Song continues:
While the Apple Watch can maintain a connection if a user accidentally turns off Bluetooth on the iPhone, third-party watches can’t. As with third-party messaging apps, users have to dive into separate permissions to turn on background app refresh and turn off low power mode if they want the most stable and consistent Bluetooth connection. This impacts passive updates, like weather or exercise tracking.
Does Google allow Wear OS smartwatches to connect with iOS devices in the first place? Continuing:
With digital wallets, the DOJ’s beef with Apple is that the company blocks financial institutions from accessing NFC hardware within the iPhone. (Though, Apple will begin allowing access in much of Europe because of new regulations in the EU.) That, in turn, limits them from providing tap-to-pay capabilities and, again, funnels iPhone users into Apple Pay and Apple Wallet.
Doing so means banks also have to pay 0.15 percent for each credit card transaction done through Apple Pay. Conversely, it’s free for banks using Samsung or Google’s payment apps. The result is that Apple got nearly $200 billion in US transactions in 2022, according to a US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report. The same agency estimates that digital wallet tap-to-pay transactions will increase by over 150 percent by 2028.
Apple is not the Mint; it has no obligation to let anyone use its technology to make near-field communication payments. It does not funnel “iPhone users into Apple Pay and Apple Wallet” because these users can continue to pay for things with regular currency. Using Apple Pay is a feature — a selling point — of the iPhone. Apparently selling products with features is against the law according to this brain-dead Justice Department. President Biden should fire Attorney General Merrick Garland, a failure of an attorney general who hasn’t even been able to prosecute a rapist for stealing confidential government secrets, then lying to the government about those secrets.
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Debunking the Justice Dept. Claims about Apple
Lauren Feiner, reporting for The Verge:
The US Department of Justice accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in an expansive new antitrust lawsuit that seeks to upend many of the ways Apple locks down iPhones.
The DOJ, along with 16 state and district attorneys general, accuses Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its phones. The parties allege that Apple “selectively” imposes contractual restrictions on developers and withholds critical ways of accessing the phone as a way to prevent competition from arising, according to the release.
“Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others,” the DOJ wrote.
The government points to several different ways that Apple has allegedly illegally maintained its monopoly:
Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices
Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware
Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android
Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues
Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone
Alright, let’s break this ridiculous lawsuit down piece by piece:
Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices…
What the hell is a “super app?” Quit making up new terms.
Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware…
That was changed two months ago. Try again.
Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android…
Completely incorrect — it’s just absolute nonsense. Apple allows every popular third-party messaging service, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Viber, Skype — you name it, the App Store has got it — on the iPhone, allowing free, interoperable, high-quality messaging between platforms. Those apps are allowed to use Apple-built application programming interfaces to integrate with Siri, the Phone app, notifications, and to display calls and text messages just like ones from Apple-made services, such as iMessage. Apple not only allows these apps to function fully on iOS but also recommends them on the App Store. Completely false — Beeper’s lobbyists have taken control of the Justice Department.
Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues…
That is literally the only good point made in this entire article. Regardless, it does not make Apple a monopoly.
Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone.
That is ludicrous. Apple Pay is an Apple technology and third-party developers have no right to it because Apple does not want them to have access to it.
Apple is a private corporation, for heaven’s sake — has the Justice Department forgotten that? Is this the European Union? The United States has thrived due to a free market where corporations are allowed to be corporations. The Justice Department blatantly ignores that Apple has (a) made a product and (b) is now using it how it wants to use that product. What is the government to control how a corporation does business as long as it is not attacking competition? Blocking access to your product is not attacking competition. Making deals with other corporations to enhance your product is not attacking competition. You know what is attacking competition? Buying WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus and owning the most egregious monopoly in the history of “Big Tech.” Maybe the Justice Department should go after Meta next — and drop this ridiculous lawsuit that will irreparably hurt Americans if won by the government.
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Vestager Threatens Restrictions on Apple’s CTF
Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters:
EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Tuesday warned Apple and Meta on their new fees for their services, saying that this may hinder users from enjoying the benefits of the Digital Markets Act which aims to give them more choices...
Vestager said the new fees have attracted her attention...
“There are things that we take a keen interest in, for instance, if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating,” she told Reuters in an interview.
Being “attractive” is not a requirement of the DMA. The DMA requires openness — it doesn’t actually care about the feelings of whoever the beneficiaries of the law are supposed to be. Vestager, once again, is bending the rules of her own law to make it do things it doesn’t do. The Core Technology Fee might make the new DMA-mandated contract less “attractive,” but that was never the point of the DMA. There is not a single line in the DMA that tells so-called “gatekeepers” that their new rules need to be morally correct and attractive. The new, alternate rules gatekeepers impose on developers just need to fit within the poorly written bounds of the DMA.
The European Parliament and European Commission are absolutely terrible at writing laws. That might sound hypocritical coming from an American, knowing Congress’ inability to do anything correctly, but no legislature in our current global political climate is particularly good at legislation. The European Union wrote a terrible, broad, non-binding, free-for-all, good-for-nothing law and is now trying to enforce it after lobbying attempts from successful companies.
At the end of the day, the DMA was written to be anti-Apple. There has not been a company that has suffered more under this ridiculous law than Apple because it was written to attack Apple and no other company. By contrast, Vestager didn’t make half as much of a fuss about Google’s anti-steering provisions or Meta’s insidious advertisement tracking technologies. Just more whininess from the European Union to discourage U.S. companies from doing business in Europe.